In this hundredth anniversary year of the 1926 general strike, JIM HORTON looks at how the ruling class has used the welfare system against the working class.
On 5 July 1926, less than two months after the Trades Union Congress called off the general strike, leaving the miners to fight alone against wage cuts and longer hours, the House of Commons debated the Board of Guardians (Default) Bill.
During the debate, George Lansbury, Labour MP for Poplar, attacked the government’s use of the Poor Law against striking miners and condemned the threat of the workhouse as a means of forcing down relief payments: “One of the oldest tricks in the Poor Law book; I know, and the Hon. Gentleman knows, that Boards of Guardians who want to cut down public assistance always use the weapon of the ‘house’ in order to bring that about”.
Lansbury’s remarks highlighted an important but often overlooked aspect of the 1926 general strike and the subsequent lockout of the miners. While the government deployed police, troops, emergency powers and volunteer strike-breakers against the strike, one of its most effective weapons was a welfare system whose origins lay in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Poor relief became part of a calculated campaign to increase hardship, particularly in mining communities.
The events of 1926 exposed the true character of the Poor Law. Far from being a neutral system for assisting the poor, it functioned as an instrument through which the state regulated and disciplined the working class. From its inception, the purpose of the 1834 Act was not to eliminate poverty but to reduce pauperism – the number of poor seeking assistance – by making relief less attractive than even the lowest paid employment.
The architects of the legislation sought to abolish outdoor relief – cash payments or assistance in kind – leaving the workhouse as the principal means of support. In the words of one assistant commissioner, conditions inside workhouses were deliberately designed to be “wholesomely repulsive”, with families separated so that only the most desperate would apply for assistance.
Sir George Nicholls, one of the original Poor Law Commissioners, expressed clearly the outlook of the ruling class: “I wish to see the Poor House looked to with dread by the labouring classes, and the reproach for being an inmate of it extend down from father to son… For without this, where is the stimulus to industry?” The message was unmistakable: workers were expected to accept long hours, dangerous conditions and low wages or face destitution and the dreaded workhouse.
In practice, economic crises repeatedly undermined attempts to completely abolish outdoor relief. During periods of mass unemployment, workhouses could not accommodate everyone needing assistance. Yet the ruling class persisted in promoting the narrative that poverty resulted primarily from individual failings rather than social and economic conditions. In reality, the poverty of the working class was a necessary prerequisite for the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class.
Building a fightback
Resistance to the Poor Law emerged almost immediately after 1834. Mass protests, including attacks on workhouses, reflected widespread hostility to the legislation and were linked to broader struggles for democratic rights, safer workplaces and shorter working hours. Similar tensions resurfaced after the first world war amid mass unemployment, industrial militancy, and ruling-class fears that the Russian revolution might inspire similar movements in Britain.
Although unemployment insurance had been introduced in 1911, until 1922 coverage was limited. Payments were always inadequate. Millions of workers continued to rely upon Poor Law assistance. In November 1921, the Glasgow Evening News reported the death of a fourteen-month-old child whose family had been reduced to starvation. Investigators found no food in the house and discovered that the family’s entire income amounted to fifteen shillings a week.
Yet some in the political establishment continued to argue that welfare payments were too generous. In October 1922, the Morning Post argued that welfare should be reformed “so that it shall no longer be said that it is less profitable to work than to do nothing”. Of course, this had never been the case. Debates around welfare have repeatedly been used to set the working poor against the unemployed poor while seeking to reduce wages and welfare costs in the interests of employers.
The extension of the franchise in 1918 enabled more working-class people to vote in local elections, including those for Boards of Guardians. Labour candidates increasingly won control, and some used their positions to defend working-class communities. The most famous example was Poplar in East London. Led by George Lansbury, socialist councillors resisted a system that imposed disproportionate burdens on poorer boroughs. Their campaign led to imprisonment in 1921, but mass support forced the government to retreat and grant significant concessions.
Labour Guardians elsewhere, including Bermondsey, Gateshead, Bedwellty and West Ham, also interpreted Poor Law regulations more generously than Whitehall permitted. To the Conservative government, this represented a dangerous challenge to central authority and the priorities of the ruling class.
Meanwhile, the coal owners were preparing a major offensive against the miners. On 30 June 1925 they demanded wage cuts, longer hours and the dismantling of existing agreements. A quarter of all miners were already unemployed, and many mining families depended upon unemployment insurance or Poor Law relief before the dispute had even begun.
Unlike the leadership of the TUC, the government prepared meticulously for the confrontation ahead. Officials reviewed the miners’ lockout of 1921 and considered how the Poor Law could be used during a future industrial dispute. During the 1921 lockout the Cabinet had considered restricting relief to strikers’ families but rejected the proposal because of fears of serious civil disorder. By 1926 ministers felt sufficiently confident to proceed much further.
Welfare offensive
The general strike began on 3 May 1926 and involved around two million workers. In response, the government mobilised troops and police, recruited strike-breaking volunteers and invoked emergency powers. It was also prepared to use welfare policy as a weapon.
Just two days into the strike, the Ministry of Health issued the notorious Circular 703. This stated that strikers were not eligible for relief, only their families. Relief scales were set below those already paid by many Poor Law authorities. A wife could receive no more than twelve shillings and a child four shillings. Nothing was payable to workers participating in a strike. The sums were wholly inadequate. With rents commonly around ten shillings a week and coal costing two shillings and sixpence per hundredweight, little remained for food. The objective was obvious: to intensify hardship and pressure strikers into returning to work.
Some Boards of Guardians paid even less than the Minister’s scale. Elsewhere, the Poor Law was openly used to encourage strike-breaking. In Lewisham, a Conservative-controlled Board paid relief on a higher scale to men prepared to undertake strike-breaking work. A welfare system created in 1834 was being deployed directly in support of the employers’ offensive against the working class.
In contrast, Labour-controlled Boards of Guardians in Poplar, West Ham and Chester-le-Street attempted to protect working-class communities from the full impact of government policy, prompting Ministry officials to protest that “where miners and union officials dominated a Board, there were complaints that the rates were being used to supplement strike funds”. In reality, the government was using public resources to assist the coal owners and help break the strike.
The general strike ended on 12 May 1926 when the TUC General Council abruptly called off the action after only nine days, without gaining any concessions and leaving the miners isolated. The government calculated that economic pressure would now prove decisive. If the coal owners could not defeat the miners directly, poverty and hunger might achieve what lockouts and police action could not.
Reports soon revealed growing distress. On 17 May, The Times noted that signs of hardship were appearing throughout South Wales and that Boards of Guardians were being overwhelmed by applications for relief. In the Pontypridd Union alone, approximately 40,000 people had applied. More than 2,000 miners marched to demand admission to the workhouse. Similar protests occurred in Stoke, Whitehaven and Mansfield. Workers were being forced to demand entry into institutions that generations of labour movement activists had regarded as symbols of oppression and degradation.
Single men were treated particularly harshly. The Times reported some Guardians would not assist them “unless they were destitute and on the point of collapse”. Relief was effectively withheld until suffering reached extreme levels.
Throughout the summer and autumn entire communities became dependent upon a wholly inadequate relief system. In mining areas such as Hemsworth, Houghton-le-Spring, Easington and Chester-le-Street, more than four in every ten residents were receiving assistance. More than sixty Poor Law Unions maintained relief rates above ten per cent of their total population for much of the period between June and September.
The impact upon mining families was especially severe. There were seventy-seven Poor Law Unions in which mining formed a significant part of local employment. In forty-five of them more than half of all miners’ families received Poor Law relief at some stage of the dispute. In several districts the figure exceeded eighty per cent.
These statistics exposed the absurdity of claims that poverty resulted from individual failings. Entire mining communities were dependent upon relief because an industry employing hundreds of thousands of workers was seeking to force miners into accepting wage cuts.
Differing responses
Many Boards of Guardians were sympathetic to the miners’ plight but unwilling to challenge the law. Sympathy, however, did not put food on the tables of miners’ families. In some areas Guardians adopted the principle established by Poplar five years earlier: it was better to break the law than break the poor. In parts of South Wales Labour-controlled Boards sought to maintain relief payments to prevent hunger.
The most striking examples came from Chester-le-Street and Bedwellty. Single miners were not normally entitled to relief. Yet both Boards frequently appointed them as assistant relieving officers. The appointments provided an income while ensuring that relief was administered sympathetically. Such measures were practical responses to widespread distress, but they infuriated officials in Whitehall.
Elsewhere the picture was very different. Some Labour authorities provided relief only on loan, leaving miners’ families with debts that took years to repay. Other Boards steadily reduced payments. Pontypool cut assistance by 25 per cent in the first week, 50 per cent in the second, 75 per cent in the third and abolished entirely in the fourth.
Outdoor relief was withdrawn altogether in some districts. In Bolton, miners’ families were informed that they must either enter the workhouse or receive no assistance. The workhouse was not being used primarily to relieve poverty but to deter applications and reduce expenditure. Sometimes this purpose was openly acknowledged. In Lichfield, where relief for miners’ dependents was abolished, one Guardian declared: “The miners had work to go to, and it was the Guardian’s duty to see they were back”. Any pretence that the Poor Law existed principally to alleviate poverty had disappeared.
The leading figure in the government’s campaign was Neville Chamberlain, Minister of Health. Throughout the dispute he insisted upon the strictest interpretation of Poor Law regulations. On 20 June 1926 he recorded in his diary: “They are not within sight of starvation, hardly of under-nutrition… they are not living too uncomfortably”.
Evidence from mining communities suggested otherwise. Investigations revealed widespread malnutrition and, in some districts, nearly half of all children under five were undernourished.
The socialist Labour MP Jimmy Maxton attacked attempts to distinguish between undernourishment and starvation. Those advancing such arguments, he said, were willing to tolerate severe suffering provided it stopped short of death, yet they would never accept such conditions for their own families.
Attacks on local government
The government was determined not only to defeat the miners but also to punish local authorities that resisted its policies. On 15 July 1926 parliament passed the Board of Guardians (Default) Act. The Act empowered Chamberlain to suspend elected Boards of Guardians and replace them with appointed administrators. Ministers justified the measure as a safeguard against alleged maladministration in areas where miners and trade unionists exercised influence over local boards.
During debates on the Bill, Chamberlain did not name Poplar directly, but he framed the legislation around boards that had “ceased, or are acting in such a manner as will render them unable, to discharge all or any of the functions”. Lansbury countered that the Bill was aimed not at administrative efficiency but at preventing socialist-led authorities from maintaining higher levels of outdoor relief.
The Act was eventually used against only three Boards of Guardians – West Ham, Chester-le-Street and Bedwellty – but the threat of suppression hung over many others. Its importance lay not simply in the number of boards removed but in the message it conveyed. Any authority that placed the needs of working-class communities above Whitehall’s priorities risked abolition.
Chester-le-Street became a particular target. The Board was suspended on 30 August 1926 because it insisted on directing relieving officers to assist single miners. Its real offence was not financial irresponsibility but refusal to abandon striking miners facing destitution. Government appointees quickly imposed what contemporaries described as rigid and orthodox Poor Law policies. In West Ham, Chester-le-Street and Bedwellty expenditure was reduced and relief payments cut. In Poor Law terms this meant an attempt to restore the principles of 1834 in their original form. The appointed Guardians achieved their objectives, but only at considerable social cost as hardship intensified.
Eventually, the government succeeded in starving the miners back to work on worse pay and longer hours. Many militants were blacklisted and continued to endure poverty well into the 1930s. Yet the government’s campaign against the working class did not end with the defeat of the miners. As well as introducing legislation the following year restricting the right to strike, including the prohibition of solidarity action, it also took steps to ensure that elected Boards of Guardians would never again be able to challenge government policy on poor relief.
The result was the Local Government Bill of 1928, which proposed transferring responsibility for welfare provision from Boards of Guardians to local councils. Chamberlain presented the legislation as a measure of administrative modernisation that would finally sweep away the remaining structures of the Poor Law. Yet while the Poor Law was widely disliked because of its association with inadequate relief and the workhouse, the government’s motives were political.
Chamberlain regarded elected Guardians who placed the needs of working-class communities above the priorities of Whitehall as a challenge to central authority. The experiences of Poplar, West Ham, Chester-le-Street and other Labour-controlled authorities had demonstrated, from his perspective, that the existing structure could no longer be trusted to serve capitalist interests. Seven years after the Poplar rates rebellion, its political legacy continued to shape debates about welfare, local government and the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor.
Labour recognised that the legislation would abolish one of the few elected institutions through which working-class communities could directly influence welfare provision. Ministers spoke of efficiency and rationalisation. Lansbury, however, linked the measure directly to the conflicts of the previous decade, arguing that Labour-controlled Boards had been targeted because they challenged official policy through their more generous interpretation of Poor Law regulations.
Political aftermath
The Local Government Act received Royal Assent in March 1929 and came into operation the following year: 643 Boards of Guardians in England and Wales formally disappeared. Responsibility for poor relief passed to county and borough councils. Conservative newspapers openly welcomed the change. They repeated Chamberlain’s argument that many boards, particularly Labour-controlled ones, had defied government policy by providing relief to able-bodied unemployed workers.
The Daily Mail celebrated the end of “Poplar/West Ham defiance”, while The Times portrayed the legislation as the final defeat of Poplarism. The abolition of the Boards of Guardians was therefore far more than an administrative reform. It represented the culmination of a political struggle that stretched from the Poplar rebellion of 1921 through the general strike and miners’ lockout of 1926.
Alongside these changes, the government had introduced further measures designed to prevent any local representatives from following the example of Poplar. The Audit (Local Authorities) Act strengthened powers to discipline councillors who defied central government policy through personal surcharges and disqualification from office.
These powers would later be used against Liverpool city council in the 1980s. Liverpool challenged government spending restrictions and prioritised jobs, housing and public services. Through mass mobilisation the council initially secured additional resources from Margaret Thatcher’s government. Yet, as in 1926, the failure of other Labour authorities to pursue a similar strategy left Liverpool increasingly isolated.
The most hated features of the Poor Law survived Chamberlain’s reforms. Although responsibility for poor relief passed to local authorities in 1930, the stigma of pauperism and the false distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor continued to shape welfare provision throughout the decade. A comprehensive welfare state would not emerge until 1948, under the Labour government of Clement Attlee. Today, though, welfare remains a contested political issue and continues to be used as an instrument of government policy.
The outcome of 1926 was not inevitable. The general strike demonstrated the enormous power of organised labour. For nine days workers challenged the normal functioning of capitalist society. The tragedy for the miners was that the TUC leadership retreated at the very moment the struggle was broadening, leaving mining communities exposed to the full force of the state.
Had the trade union leadership matched the determination shown by the rank and file, events might have developed very differently. At the very least, it would have been far more difficult for the government to use the Poor Law as a weapon to starve the miners back to work. More fundamentally, a general strike raises the question of who should control society. Neither the leaders of the trade unions nor the Labour Party were prepared to take the necessary measures to answer that question in favour of the working class.
Nor was the defeat of Poplarism inevitable. The significance of 1926 extends beyond the defeat of a single strike. The dispute revealed the political character of welfare under capitalism. The Poor Law was not a neutral institution standing above class conflict. It formed part of a wider system through which the state sought to regulate labour, reduce public expenditure and defend existing social relations.
Poplar and other Labour Boards of Guardians attempted to protect their communities from hunger and destitution. Yet the wider Labour leadership was unwilling to support a strategy based upon defying the law in defence of the poor. As a result, authorities such as Poplar, West Ham and Chester-le-Street were left isolated, much as Liverpool would be in the 1980s.
The Boards of Guardians disappeared on 1 April 1930, but the conflict they embodied has not. The tension between central government’s capitalist priorities and the need to defend local services for working-class communities remains. Local authorities of all political hues continue to face choices about whether to implement cuts or resist them. All practice the former.
How the Poor Law was implemented during the 1926 general strike and miners’ lockout, and the response of Poplarism, raises questions on not only welfare policy, but working-class political representation and socialism.